Rembrandt: A Life
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3.4 • 9 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Until now he has remained a mystery, leaving only a few sentences, the letters of his bankruptcy, a mistress's notarized complaint - and the most glorious, compassionate paintings ever to astonish the eye.
The first pure biography of this enigmatic legend is a fascinating detective story in which, clue by clue, the man himself emerges. Charles Mee, historian and playwright, renders a finely textured portrait of the artist against a richly described background of seventeenth-century life.
He captures the human Rembrandt, the ordinary man and unexpected genius. We see the youthful, arrogant poseur, son of a small-town miller, seeking a life of art amid the cosmopolitan bustle of Amsterdam. We see the outsider struggling to rise without patron or court commissions, failing as an entrepreneur while immortalizing simple people in works of haunting complexity.
We see the inspired moments behind masterworks like The Anatomy Lesson and Nightwatch and all the conflicting guises of their creator - bohemian and aspiring bourgeois, husband and lover, honored genius, penurious vagabond, and finally, the essential dichotomy - the egocentric master who, despite his intense self-absorption, captured the diversity of humanity with extraordinary empathy, sensitivity, and grace.
Customer Reviews
A good bio for beginners
Charles Mee's biography of Rembrandt is a good place to start. In clear, informal prose he lays out the facts and the possibilities about this great artist's life. Possibilities because so little is known about the facts. He connects the dots with logic and sensitivity. But I only give the book 3 stars in its e-format because the book has no illustrations--let's hear it for Google Images, which I consulted throughout--and because in the second half especially words are dropped helter-skelter in almost every paragraph--prepositions and determiners mostly, but also nouns, verbs and the occasional "not."